“CNN and MSNBC and Fox are engaging in
the terrorism expert industrial complex, where you have people on as paid
analysts that are largely frauds who have made a lot of money off of portraying
themselves as terror experts and have no actual on-the-ground experience.”

They,
together with other internationally informed reports I have heard, agree that
terrorism has no reasonable substance to it.It has become a computer/internet-generated game of guilt by (claim of)
association with the US caricature of “the bad guys”—currently Muslims to
qualify for terrorist watch lists.Its
domestic counterpart is the computer-generated, systematically fed, COMPSTAT
system that NYPD pioneered using to press police to keep minor public order
arrests and contraband seizures up, and index crime reports down.Now the Commissioner assures the public that
arrests and fine revenues are and will continue to increase.Once again, NYPD will subscribe to the “broken
windows” standard of police performance: by clearing the streets of minor
offenses, you cut off serious crime at its roots, and demonstrate serious crime
reductions.It is a tautology that proving
law enforcement effective has increasingly been pressed on police nationwide
since the beginning of computer analyses of crime and criminality became
possible to researchers and policy makers since the late sixties, heralded by
the President’s Commission on Law
Enforcement and Administration of Justice Task Force Report on Assessment in
1967.Soon, we are assured the NYPD will
be back on the track of demonstrating that arrests and summonses are up, while
crime stays under control.Enforcement
is up, crime is down.

An admission of bias:task force director Lloyd Ohlin and commission
director James Vorenberg introduced me to crime measurement in their crime, law
and society class.The major exam
question at the end of the term was to advise a congressional committee on what
to make, for instance, of the fact that the pioneering national victim surveys
showed crime to be much greater than that reported to the police.My advice was that because the police were
probably so detached from most crime, didn’t even know about it, let alone care
to report it, that what happened behind closed doors for instance might be much
more violent than what police found on the streets…I got one of my two
law-school C’s, the other was in corporations.Beginning with my dissertation study of police-offense reporting in a
high-crime area of Minneapolis in 1972, I continued to focus on issues of
measuring crime and criminality for over a decade, until I shifted my sights
onto structures of violence and their transformation.To me, reports about “terrorist threats” are
just a primitive form of crime and criminality analysis in the cyber-age.It is an exercise in profiling by religion
and national origin.It has become an
inter-national security industry.

Back
to policing.There is a good deal of
reporting of how ethnically and racially diverse the NYPD is becoming, and with
it, more culturally diverse attitudes about policing that younger officers in
particular bring to the force, one that entails giving respect and service to
those for whom they police.On the
bright side, homicides of and by police don’t seem as bad as they were when I
was first studying crime.For better or
worse, the technology that spawned COMPSTAT also increases the likelihood that
police use of deadly force, and deaths of police officers too, will be
recorded, will be noticed, will be nationally reported.It is typically the case that peacemaking
initiatives have low social visibility—seldom get looked for, let alone
reported.I don’t imagine times have
changed much since I rode with the police:Some officers are trouble, many if not most are pretty socially skilled
at defusing violence, and seldom find more force than a frisk and uneventful
handcuffing to be necessary when they arrest.Officers will back each other up if one gets into trouble; better to
avoid working with bullies.All in all,
perhaps police will get to know those they police in less confrontational, more
personal respects.

I
hope and dream for something more direct.COMPSTAT is founded on the myth of the dangerous young black or brown
man, and profiling by association within these groups has become a larger and
more entrenched cyber-guarantor of national and local security.As far as I can see, trends and shapes of “crime”
have never had to do much security.The
occasional (and statistically, they are occasional!) incidents of police
killings of young people of color are but symptoms of a chronic climate of
fear, anger and distrust between police and communities of color, an old
climate whose casualties have now appeared to us in an unprecedented cyber-cluster.The fact that protests are so large and
widespread indicates that police administration and training divides police
from those they police.Trust rests on
safe familiarity.The COMPSTAT machine,
meanwhile, demands confrontation and separation of people from their
community.Whether homicides of and by
police go up or down, the daily problem so many protestors and people of color
generally report are a testament to police-community estrangement.When you are policing people you don’t know
personally, you are reduced to profiling those you meet—as potential threats
and violators, or as people you can trust to remain cordial.Whoever initiates it (and for all I know it
IS initiated and unreported), police and those they police need to get to know
each other including settings, where the police aren’t armed and uniformed,
aren’t on duty.For the NYPD and many
other police forces around the world, COMPSTAT has institutionalized policing
according to racial and ethnic stereotypes.Internationally, the cyber-security terrorism/industrial complex is its
counterpart.I’m a dreamer: May the
paradigm shift to securing police-community relations.Love and peace, hal

About Me

I retired Jan. 2009 from after 33 years on the criminal justice faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. I continue not to charge for any form of public service, including speaking and consulting, and now have plenty of free time to do so on request. I do not do social networking. I regularly monitor just one email account: pepinsky@indiana.edu; my home phone number is 1-614-885-6341; my skype name is halpep. My papers and such are archived at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?brand=general&docId=InU-Ar-VAA9639.xml&doc.view=entire_text.
I am known as a co-founder of "peacemaking criminology." Page proofs of my latest, 2006 U of Ottawa Press book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, are freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf , the end of which lists my publications, nine books and over 80 articles and chapters in all, on a wide range of subjects from the international to the interpersonal level. My preceding book, A Criminologist's Quest for Peace, is also freely available at http://critcrim.org/pepinsky, and a pdf of Myths That Cause Crime is on the critcrim.org home page.